The present invention relates to data processing by digital computer, and more particularly to workload balancing in environments with multiple clusters of application servers.
In general, clustering is the use of multiple computers, multiple storage devices, and redundant interconnections, to form what appears to users as a single highly available system. Cluster computing can be used for load balancing as well as for high availability. Load balancing is dividing the amount of work that a computer has to do between two or more computers so that more work gets done in the same amount of time and, in general, all users get served faster. Load balancing can be implemented with hardware, software, or a combination of both.
Traditional workload balancing methods in clustered application server environments focus on distribution of load within a single cluster to a static amount of server instances. This static sizing and distribution of load has drawbacks in the performance and resource utilization when multiple clusters are deployed and operated in parallel.